Sorry, but you don’t count because you’re too young, liberal, and you’ve been brainwashed.
Speaking of health insurance, I just got to spend what I call a freedom-hour on the phone dealing with my health care provider. They automatically bill my insurance, but if they don’t hear back within 30min, they automatically generate and send me a bill. Oddly enough, they don’t bother to auto-generate a followup note when my insurance actually pays them. So after every appointment I get a bill, and after every bill I get to call and ask if insurance paid it. Joy.
I’m pretty much with you Agent. It has worked for me. Though it has at times been a huge pain in the ass. If you ever need even minor surgery in the USA, prepare for a mountain of paperwork. Mostly because every doctor, insurance company, hospital and physical thearapist has a completly different billing practice.
I think we could save billions, just by getting some normilization in the billing practice. It’s crazy.
I don’t have 100 posts to my name, so I suppose my opinion doesn’t count, but I have so far experienced three countries’ health care systems – first 28 years in the US, then 11 years in Canada, now 5 months in the UK – and I can say without a smidgen of doubt that I much prefer UHC to no UHC. Though my experience thus far in the UK is limited by my brief time here, I can say that so far it seems that there is more coverage than in Canada – NHS covers part of my dental bill and also the lion’s share of my prescriptions, and I can also get an eye exam without paying out of pocket, apparently. In Canada, these things are not covered by the province in which I lived, though one can get provincial pharmaceutical drug coverage with a deductible based on last year’s income. Here there’s just a flat “you pay £3 for your prescription no matter what it is or how many pills are in it” rate. Suits me.
Here’s an anecdote. My mother was a university professor with work-related insurance coverage – Blue Cross if I recall correctly. For ten years she was unable to get a proper diagnosis or treatment for persistent, disabling back and neck pain that led to loss of function in her right arm. Eventually she was no longer working and on disability, at which point Medicaid (or Medicare, I can’t remember which one she’s on) enabled her to get the crushed disc in her neck diagnosed and operated on, and she was finally relieved of the constant pain and could start recovering the use of her arm.
Ten years. Ten years WITH INSURANCE that she was paying premiums for, paying for a service which systematically denied her diagnosis and treatment and physical therapy and such things that would have prevented her from becoming disabled in the first place if she had received them in a timely manner. Ten years of periodically ending up in the emergency room in the middle of the night to get a shot of cortisone to relieve the unremitting pain of something which required surgery but which her insurance wouldn’t even let her find out what it was, much less take care of it. Not until she was in the hands of the government-supplied health care coverage was she able to do so and start being a relatively productive member of society again.
That is fucked up. Now she’s firmly within the stupid “doughnut hole” that Bush put into the system so that people who need more care can’t get it until they go completely bankrupt.
the reason I had that 100 post requirement was because I felt it to be too easy for someone to create an account for the sole purpose of disagreeing with me, whether that person be a sock of another poster or a troll or whatever.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Looking at my other thread, it appears as if 95% of the SDMB who responded prefer UHC care, regardless of where they currently live. Only a single person lives with UHC and prefers the US’s care but since that person hasn’t come forward to explain why, I’m not going to concede defeat quite yet.